by Teju Cole
And I also write all this as a novelist and story writer: I am sensitive to the power of narratives. When Jason Russell, narrator of the Kony 2012 video, showed his cheerful blond toddler a photo of Joseph Kony as the embodiment of evil (a glowering dark man), and of his friend Jacob as the representative of helplessness (a sweet-faced African), I wondered how Russell’s little boy would develop a nuanced sense of the lives of others, particularly others of a different race from his own. How would that little boy come to understand that others have autonomy; that their right to life is not exclusive of a right to self-respect? In a different context, John Berger once wrote, “A singer may be innocent; never the song.”
One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of “making a difference.” To state this obvious and well-attested truth does not make me a racist. It does give me away as a “middle-class educated African,” and I plead guilty as charged. (It is also worth noting that there are other middle-class educated Africans who see this matter differently from me. That is what people, educated and otherwise, do: they assess information and sometimes disagree with each other.)
In any case, Kristof and I are in agreement about one thing: there is much happening in many parts of the African continent that is not as it ought to be. I have been fortunate in life, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen or experienced African poverty firsthand. I grew up in a land of military coups and economically devastating, IMF-imposed “structural adjustment” programs. The genuine hurt of Africa is no fiction.
And we also agree on something else: that there is an internal ethical urge that demands that each of us serve justice as much as he or she can. But beyond the immediate attention that he rightly pays hungry mouths, child soldiers, or raped civilians, there are more complex and more widespread problems. There are serious problems of governance, of infrastructure, of democracy, and of law and order. These problems are neither simple in themselves nor reducible to slogans. Such problems are both intricate and intensely local.
How, for example, could a well-meaning American “help” a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regard to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments (I’ve seen many) about how “we have to save them because they can’t save themselves” can’t change that fact.
Let me draw into this discussion an example from an African country I know very well. Earlier in 2012, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians took to their country’s streets to protest the government’s decision to remove a subsidy on petrol. This subsidy was widely seen as one of the few blessings of the country’s otherwise catastrophic oil wealth. But what made these protests so heartening was that they were about more than the subsidy removal. Nigeria has one of the most corrupt governments in the world, and protesters clearly demanded that something be done about this. The protests went on for days, at considerable personal risk to the protesters. Several young people were shot dead, and the movement was eventually doused when union leaders capitulated and the army deployed on the streets. The movement did not “succeed” in conventional terms. But something important had changed in the political consciousness of the Nigerian populace. For me and for a number of people I know, the protests gave us an opportunity to be proud of Nigeria, many of us for the first time in our lives.
This is not the sort of story that is easy to summarize in an article, much less make a viral video about. After all, there is no simple demand to be made and—since corruption is endemic—no single villain to topple. There is certainly no “bridge character,” Kristof’s euphemism for white saviors in Third World narratives who make the story more palatable to American viewers. And yet, the story of Nigeria’s protest movement is one of the most important from sub-Saharan Africa so far this year. Men and women, of all classes and ages, stood up for what they felt was right; they marched peacefully; they defended one another, and gave one another food and drink; Christians stood guard while Muslims prayed and vice versa; and they spoke without fear to their leaders about the kind of country they wanted to see. All of it happened with no cool American twenty-something heroes in sight.
Joseph Kony is no longer in Uganda and he is no longer the threat he was, but he is a convenient villain for those who need a convenient villain. What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony’s indictment is a more equitable civil society, a more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice. This is the scaffolding from which infrastructure, security, healthcare, and education can be built. How do we encourage voices like those of the Nigerian masses who marched this January, or those who are engaged in the struggle to develop Ugandan democracy?
If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on Africa itself. The fact of the matter is that Nigeria is one of the top five oil suppliers to the United States, and American policy is interested first and foremost in the flow of that oil. The American government did not see fit to support the Nigeria protests. (Though the State Department issued a supportive statement—“our view on that is that the Nigerian people have the right to peaceful protest, we want to see them protest peacefully, and we’re also urging the Nigerian security services to respect the right of popular protest and conduct themselves professionally in dealing with the strikes”—it reeked of boilerplate rhetoric and, unsurprisingly, nothing tangible came of it.) This was as expected; under the banner of “American interests,” the oil comes first. Under that same banner, the livelihood of corn farmers in Mexico has been destroyed by NAFTA. Haitian rice farmers have suffered appalling losses due to Haiti being flooded with subsidized American rice. A nightmare has been playing out in Honduras in the past three years: an American-backed coup and American militarization of that country have contributed to a conflict in which hundreds of activists and journalists have already been murdered. The Egyptian military, which is now suppressing the country’s once-hopeful movement for democracy and killing dozens of activists in the process, subsists on $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid. This is a litany that will be familiar to some. To others, it will be news. But, familiar or not, it has a bearing on our notions of innocence as well as the ways in which we offer help.
Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to “make a difference” trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don’t always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system developed on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send ten dollars each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself, and I believe in the necessity of emergency aid), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.
Success for Kony 2012 would mean increased militarization of the antidemocratic Yoweri Museveni government, which has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and has played a major role in the world’s deadliest ongoing conflict, the war in the Congo. But those whom privilege allows to deny constell
ational thinking would enjoy ignoring this fact. There are other troubling connections, not least of them being that Museveni appears to be a proxy of the United States in its shadowy battles against militants in Sudan and, especially, in Somalia. Who sanctions these conflicts? Under whose authority and oversight are they conducted? Who is being killed and why?
All of this takes us rather far afield from fresh-faced young Americans using the power of YouTube, Facebook, and pure enthusiasm to change the world. A singer may be innocent; never the song.
“Perplexed…Perplexed”
ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012, four students at the University of Port Harcourt, in southern Nigeria, went to the nearby village of Aluu. They had gone to collect a debt from a man named Coxson Lucky. The students were young men, all in their teens or early twenties. At Aluu, they tried to shake down Lucky (how aggressively, no one really knows); it seems they also seized some items belonging to him. Lucky raised an alarm, a crowd gathered, and the students found themselves accused of stealing laptops and phones. They were immediately set upon by the mob, stripped, paraded through town, and beaten with sticks. They began to plead for their lives and, even as they did so, were weighed down with tires and set alight. All four of them—Chiadika Biringa, Ugonna Obuzor, Lloyd Toku, and Tekena Elkanah—died there, in the mud of Aluu village.
Lynching is common in Nigeria. Extrajudicial killing is often the fate of those accused of kidnapping and armed robbery, but also of those suspected of minor crimes like pickpocketing. These incidents, if reported at all, get one or two paragraphs in the newspapers and are forgotten. Nevertheless, the killings of the Aluu 4, as they have come to be known, touched a nerve in Nigeria. This was in large part because the murders were filmed and uploaded to YouTube and, soon after, seen by many among Nigeria’s huge population of Internet-savvy youths. In the days that followed, there was a pained and horrified discussion across Nigerian social media. How could this happen? What sort of society had we become? Would the guilty be caught and punished?
I could not watch the video. I was still haunted by a clip I saw years ago of another lynching. Two men had been set on fire, and were being whipped. The skin came off their bodies in oily red strips, and their tormentors urged one another to slow down and let them suffer. I could bear only to look at the stills from this new video. But I found the response to the incident among the Nigerian public interesting. The outrage was loud and long. It was as though this were the first time such a thing had ever happened, as though Nigerian society were not already mired in frequent and almost orgiastic spates of violence. Somehow, this incident had differentiated itself from the terrorist attacks by Boko Haram, the endless killings by “unknown gunmen,” the carnage on the roads, the armed robberies, the dispiriting catalogue of crimes in places high and low.
What was the cause of this soul-searching? What made the Aluu 4 different from dozens of others killed by mobs in the past few years? What innocence had been destroyed by this particular spontaneous instance of murder?
—
One evening in September 2010, the lawyer and poet Tade Ipadeola was driving home in Dugbe, Ibadan, in southwestern Nigeria. It was a drizzly night. Visibility was poor. From his car, a white sedan, he saw a speeding motorcyclist ahead of him collide with another motorcyclist. The motorcycle that was hit wobbled slightly and went on its way. The one that caused the collision was slewed across the road. The male motorcyclist and his female passenger lay prone on the asphalt. The man wore no helmet, and blood from his cracked skull pooled on the road. The woman writhed in pain. Ipadeola parked some fifteen meters from the scene of the crime, left his engine idling, his beams on, and hurried to help the accident victims. He was the first on the scene, but, very soon after, other cars had parked, and so had other motorcycles. Someone from the gathering crowd said, “The white car hit them.” At this announcement, a sudden fear coursed through Ipadeola. That was his car that had been mentioned. His guilt was established by his mere presence at the scene.
“It takes ten seconds, more or less, for the mob to decide whether to administer their brand of justice,” Ipadeola said, in recounting the incident to me. “The diabolical compression of time was the most frightening part.” Everyone looked at him menacingly. Especially dangerous was the assembled brotherhood of motorcyclists, who are always to be found defending their own in such situations. There were only two possible outcomes once guilt was established: either they burned the car or they burned the car and its driver. But on this night, another voice spoke out of the crowd claiming that, no, it was the man bleeding on the road who had hit another motorcycle. Some section of the crowd seemed to believe this, and Ipadeola walked back to his car, shaking, hoping that the tide, which had suddenly turned in his favor, wouldn’t suddenly turn again. He made it home alive that night. He lived to tell the tale.
—
One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness. It is sudden. It pounces. In Ikeja, Lagos, in 2011, two men, Alaba and Samuel, were severely beaten and very nearly killed for eating human flesh. Closer investigation showed that what they’d been chewing on was, in fact, beef. By this time, their punishers had long dispersed into the city. In Nigeria we sometimes call these mob actions “jungle justice.” Most people are not opposed to them on principle. As a sweet-natured aunt of mine said a few years ago, referring to my question about thieves who had been killed by vigilantes, “Why do we need such people in the society anyway? It’s better to just get rid of them.” She was expressing the pain that many feel about the violent crimes, and their desire for instant restitution.
“Jungle justice”: the term is uncomfortable in the way it seems to confirm the worst prejudices that outsiders might have about daily life in Nigeria. Won’t the expression make people think that Nigeria is a savage place? Certainly, from the experience of the people I know who barely escaped being lynched by an irate mob, who encountered that sudden, startling, and almost fatal diminishment of self that occurs when hostile strangers close in on you, no term is too strong or too angry to characterize what mobs do. Jungle justice is not the half of it. But we should be fair enough to set Nigerian street justice in its various contexts.
Mob rule—or to give it its technical name, “ochlocracy”—was not invented in Nigeria. Theories of the mob predate ancient Rome. Extrajudicial murders litter the post–Civil War history of the American South, all the way to, and beyond, the story of James Byrd, Jr., in 1998. Punitive murder by the police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and probably still exists in most. In cosmopolitan centers like New York and Paris, until at least the early years of the twentieth century, lynchings were reported in the newspapers. Félix Fénéon, writing faits divers—brief news items, usually of a peculiar or violent nature—in Le Matin in 1906, recorded several instances of people being set upon by mobs. For instance one reads (in a translation by Luc Sante): “Near Brioude, a bear was smothering a child. Some peasants shot the beast and nearly lynched its exhibitor.”
While working on a project I call small fates, modeled closely on Fénéon’s faits divers, I found several similar instances in the New York of a hundred years ago. Lynching in the United States is so closely tied to racial violence that we forget that it often featured in incidents where race was not at issue. In one story, a man on East Houston Street, who had attacked his lover with a razor, nearly lost his life to a mob. There were other incidents of lynchings or near lynchings: after a jailbreak, when people attacked a driver who hit a child, and so on. More recently, there has been a rise in such spontaneous acts of violence in places such as Jamaica, Pakistan, and Kenya.
What many of these societies have in common is a crisis of modernity. People, finding themselves surrounded by newly complex circumstances, and finding themselves sharing space with neighbors whom they do not know and with whom they don’t necessarily share traditions, defend themselves in terrible new ways. The old customs have passed away, and the new, less reassuring, less tr
aditional modes of life are struggling to be born. Mobs arise out of this crisis. They are a form of impatience.
The investiture of legal power in the hands of the state evolved as a way to stem endless vendettas, blood feuds, and unauthorized violence. In countries with properly functioning legal systems, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices. The mob flows into that vacuum, and looks for whom to kill. A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.
—
In 2011, in Gusau, a town in the northern state of Zamfara, Saminu Ibrahim, a journalist, went to a local branch of Skye Bank to withdraw some money. While he was there, one of the bank staff, Idowu Olatunji, suddenly experienced a hysterical episode in which he felt his penis had vanished. This peculiar form of anxiety, which happens with some regularity in public places in Nigeria, is usually followed by the accusation that someone nearby “stole” the penis. A crowd gathers, and rarely is there any kind of examination of the accuser’s body. His word is simply taken for it, and a beating of the accused, sometimes fatal, follows.
Within its highly particularized context, this bizarre sequence of events makes a perverse sort of sense. It might even be interpreted as no more perverse than some things that pass for the normal abnormality in other societies, such as those in American culture, “alcohol and drug abuse, major depression, dysthymia, mania, hypomania, panic disorder, social and specific phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder,” a list presented by Frank Bures in his extraordinarily nuanced Harper’s essay on penis theft in Nigeria, “A Mind Dismembered.” Bures, struggling to understand the psychological context for this kind of anxiety, notes that “every culture has its own logic, its own beliefs, its own stresses.”